Salesman

Days and nights in Leo Koenig’s gallery.

Of the many moments that may have moved Leo Koenig to become an art dealer, the one he’d choose, if he had to choose one, is an encounter he had eight years ago, when he was twenty and living with three roommates—two Lithuanians and a German—in an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He’d come to New York from Munich a few months earlier, in part to avoid military service in Germany. One night, another Lithuanian stopped in, an artist named Aidas Bareikis. They had dinner and then began drinking vodka. After a while, Koenig suggested that they try snorting the vodka instead, which can be rough on the nasal passages but in this instance had the desired effect of fostering an atmosphere conducive to the telling of life stories.

Bareikis, who was twenty-nine, had a good one. In 1985, as an art-school student in Vilnius, he’d been drafted into the Soviet Army. After two months, a Soviet general paid his unit a visit. There was a uniform inspection, and Bareikis was found to be wearing an undershirt on which he’d painted the Lithuanian flag. He was sent to the brig—solitary confinement in a pitch-black cistern buried in the ground—and then to a mental hospital, where doctors could not find evidence that his affection for his native republic had anything to do with madness. He was shipped off to Afghanistan, to fight the mujahideen. At first, he didn’t see combat, but he did see, while loading trains bound for Russia, some of its results: caskets, quadriplegics, amputees. He came across a mangled helicopter covered in soldiers’ blood. Later, his convoy was ambushed, and he spent three days and nights behind a rock, pinned down by enemy fire. He told himself, “I’ve got to go back to art school.”

Bareikis and a few other Baltic draftees began scrounging for pencils and grinding the graphite into powder, which they inhaled through their noses in an effort to poison themselves. They also tried rolling fingernail parings into their cigarettes and depriving themselves of sleep. After a couple of weeks of this, Bareikis, delirious and suffering from high blood pressure, was ordered to see the unit’s medical officer, who was instantly suspicious. “Are you faking it or not?” he asked Bareikis. Bareikis decided to tell the truth, and the officer decided to help him. Bareikis was hospitalized and declared unfit for combat. Eventually, he returned to Vilnius, finished school, won a Fulbright, and, in 1992, made his way to New York, to pursue an M.F.A. He spoke almost no English. For money, he did construction and demolition work. He was often homeless. He found that if he slept in a tree in Central Park no one would bother him. For a while, he squatted in a loft in SoHo; on the same day he got evicted, he learned that he’d won a green card in the State Department’s immigration lottery—an experience that became the inspiration for a piece titled “You Have Fifteen Minutes to Leave,” which, like most of his work, was a gaudy and monstrous sculptural installation of found or shoplifted materials. In general, his work was hard to sell, and even harder to look at, but in some circles he acquired a reputation as a sort of a beacon—the genuine article.

Koenig considers the night he met Bareikis to be one of the best of his life. They stayed up past dawn and became fast friends. Months later, when Koenig mentioned to Bareikis that he was looking for something adventurous to do, a way to bring people together and have a little fun—he was thinking of opening a restaurant—Bareikis told him, “No, you should do a gallery.” Koenig did, and in his inaugural show he exhibited a work by Bareikis called “Embarkation for Cythera” (after Watteau). The gallery was in Williamsburg. Koenig and Bareikis transported the installation, disassembled and crammed into garbage bags, from Bareikis’s studio by bicycle. On the day of the opening, they sat alone in the gallery, waiting for people to show up. To allay their anxiety, they started in on the mountain of beer they’d stockpiled for the occasion and eventually sank into a stupor in a back room. Hours later, they came to and discovered that the gallery was full—some seven hundred guests, if Koenig recalls correctly. Art revellers spilled into the street. Among them was Klaus Biesenbach, the chief curator at P.S. 1, who liked the work enough to include Bareikis in an exhibition of emerging artists. Bareikis’s installation at P.S. 1, “Yellow Peril, Friendly Fire,” was purchased for thirteen thousand dollars by an eccentric collector from Berlin. It was Koenig’s first sale.

Koenig likes this version of his beginnings because it accentuates the wildness of the early days, the serendipity and the cheek. It also camouflages the significance of his birthright. Koenig’s father, Kasper, is the director of the Museum Ludwig, in Cologne, and is one of the most prominent curators in Europe. Koenig’s mother, Ilka, is a well-known purveyor of art books in Munich. His uncle Walter is one of Europe’s biggest publishers of art books. (There is also family wealth—a house-paint business going back several generations—but it has not accrued either to Kasper Koenig or to his children.) Leo Koenig grew up surrounded by artists and critics, steeped, if not fully engaged, in their work and conversation, and his surname has eased his entry into the art trade. It confers legitimacy, in a world where legitimacy is amorphous and highly coveted. Some people begrudge him his connections, and point out that making it in the art world is so easy for a Koenig that even Leo’s younger half brother Johann has a gallery, despite being almost blind. (When he was eleven, he was playing with fireworks and they exploded in his face.) Some skeptics also say that Koenig hasn’t done much with the head start, that he is merely a party boy—the Paris Hilton of Germany, as one art-world figure said to me, with an anonymous unkindness that seems typical of the trade. But others recognize that the advantage has as much to do with sensibility as with preferential treatment; his boyhood exposure to the art world, to its esoteric language of ideas, attitudes, and names, gave him an education that he would not have received in graduate school. Anyway, as far as the Paris Hilton problem is concerned, Koenig has mellowed, to the extent that these days he finds himself going through what he wistfully calls “a nostalgic phase.” He fears being seen as a sellout, a mere merchant among the creative and difficult souls who make the art, and the hard partying seems, by his reckoning, a kind of inoculation against that. Reputation, in this world, requires a delicate balance: being both a businessman and a rascal, without being seen as too much of one or the other, or even as either one at all, entails constant adjustment, whether you are an art prince or a self-made man.

The occasion for these anxieties was his gallery’s move, this summer, from the backwater of Centre Street, at the edge of Chinatown, to a big storefront space in Chelsea, as concentrated a district of art exhibition and commerce as exists anywhere. Chelsea attracts collectors, small buyers, browsers, consultants, advisers, curators, critics, and all kinds of “weirdo cats who make money off the art world in weird ways,” a curator / critic / consultant named David Hunt told me. Together, they are after some kind of consensus of taste, and the money and the acclaim—and even the transcendence—that come with it.

This pursuit has got a little out of hand in recent years. Art, like real estate, has been enjoying a long and durable speculative boom, attracting, as it did a century ago, in the days of Duveen, the obsessive and competitive attentions of an expanding class of people who are very, very rich and who, for reasons ranging from the noble to the crass, have chosen visual art as an instrument for their aspirations. The appetite for new work is such that little-known artists command outlandish prices—if the circumstances align, a first-timer might sell a painting for fifteen thousand dollars, and then see its price double inside of a year. There are more artists, more galleries, and more buyers, and as a result the art world has grown more diffuse. There is no era-defining dealer, as there was in the heyday of Leo Castelli or of Mary Boone. Larry Gagosian is a powerhouse; Marian Goodman is a doyenne. But there are dozens of gallery owners out there, many of them young, with artists who, to varying degrees, are critically celebrated, institutionally represented, and commercially successful. Thirty years from now, a few of these dealers will have some claim to permanence. This depends, of course, on their artists’ work, and it is the dealer’s role to persuade people to think highly of it. “I’m aware that if I do my job right I will be forgotten and the artists will never be forgotten,” Koenig told me one night. He likes to think that he is presiding over an incipient movement, citing as a model the community of German neo-expressionists who came to prominence three or four decades ago, some of whom are family friends. The correlation is as strained as it is personal, but it reflects his belief that, as he put it, “you create your own context.”

Koenig represents a dozen artists, most of them emerging artists. There are just two women: the painter Nicole Eisenman, who had a reputation and following before she joined Koenig, and Kelli Williams, who has made just six paintings and has never sold one. Mainly, Koenig’s enterprise is anchored by a group of hard-drinking New York men in their thirties, who have been with him more or less from the beginning. The artists hang out together, and Koenig hangs out with them. In this respect, the gallery is unusual, more fraternity than salon. “There is so much cheating and finagling in this business that a lot of dealers don’t want their artists even talking to each other,” Koenig told me. He rarely goes anywhere without at least one or two of his artists in tow. He hosts regular dinners in restaurants, arraying them around him like apostles. The artists call him Opa, the German for Grandpa, even though he is years younger than most of them. “You look for these surrogate fathers and then you play one,” he told me.

Koenig’s most striking attribute, besides his youth, is his height. He is six feet four inches tall—gangly, long-limbed, and baby-faced. These days, he has a beard and close-cropped hair. A few years ago, he abruptly put on sixty-five pounds, transforming himself into a startling caricature of a brau-and-bratwurst Münchner, but then he quit drinking for a spell and, with the aid of a treadmill, a rowing machine, and a sauna that he installed in his bedroom, reverted to form. Still, he can project a cartoonish persona: the way he allows his arms and legs to flap around and his eyes to bulge after he’s had a couple of pints suggests that he has a good sense of what it is about Germans—bossiness, buffoonery, clusters of consonants—that Americans find funny. He often wears suspenders. His accent is not overwhelming, but his malaprop rate is about two per hour: “Can you borrow me a pen?” “Let’s have a night drink.”

I often heard Koenig pass judgment on works of art (“fantastic,” “amazing,” “crap”), but he rarely explained himself, except to mention the work’s provenance or to point out a section of it and say, “Look at that,” as though taste, his and everyone else’s, were universal. It takes a certain amount of nerve to act as though one knows what is good or, more important, what will be deemed good in the future. It’s an article of faith in the art world that some people have an eye for it and some people don’t; the disagreement arises over which do or don’t.

“I am happy when people relate to my way of thinking,” Koenig told me one evening, over Pilsners in the back office at his gallery, Leo Koenig Inc. He was seated behind a big desk, hands clasped behind his head, a wall of art books to his left, a small neon sign that read “dealer” to his right. “And there is a monetary aspect to that. The more money you make, the more people are relating to it.” By that measure, people seem to be relating well to him. Still, he offers contradictory statements about his financial status, a reflection of the murkiness of the business he is in. To the art market, obfuscation is like oxygen. One moment, he would say, as he showed me his messy one-bedroom apartment, just upstairs from his old gallery on Centre Street, with its fairly slapdash and unceremoniously displayed collection of art work, “I can’t afford my own art.” Then, some other time, he would say, of his new gallery space, which he currently rents for fifteen thousand dollars a month, “I could buy this in a day if I wanted to,” suggesting that a couple of million dollars was a phone call away. His longtime girlfriend Debora Warner, an artist with whom he shares the apartment, told him, during a recent drunken 3 a.m. heart-to-heart, “I don’t understand your financial situation.”

The rudiments are this: He generally pockets fifty per cent of every sale—the industry standard. A few of his artists, such as the Austrian conceptual collective Gelatin and the versatile prankster Jonathan Meese, are based in Europe and have their primary dealers there. He handles their work in the United States, and usually kicks back ten per cent of each sale to the primary dealer. (He gets a similar cut when his artists show abroad.) Some of his artists receive money from him up front, which can result, essentially, in his owning their work. Not everyone is comfortable with this arrangement, as it implies a kind of indentured servitude; others require it. He does not have contracts with any of them. A dealer does not want to sell one of his artist’s pieces to someone who will turn around and resell it a month or a year later, because then the dealer can’t control who gets the artist’s work, in what context it will be exhibited, or at what price it will sell. If a work turns up at auction, the dealer often must be ready to bid on it himself. He may even buy work straight out of his own artist’s studio. “If I’m not happy with a particular piece of work, I might buy it and put it in storage, to keep it off the market,” Koenig told me. He says that he has a net worth of zero; the profits go back into the business. That may be so, but there are probably more zeros this year than last. He estimates that he will sell ten million dollars’ worth of art in 2005, many times more than he has sold before.

This has been possible because, in addition to selling his own artists’ work, he has been active in the secondary market—that is, buying and selling work that has already been sold at least once. With good contacts and a good eye, you can make a fine living at it. Sometimes this involves speculating, acquiring works in the expectation of reselling them for more later; sometimes it involves matching up a collector who covets a particular work with one who wants to part with it. The market is unregulated and inefficient. “I do well with my artists,” Koenig said. “But the secondary market puts me at ease.” Koenig spent months this year discussing a potential offshore enterprise, with a Danish dealer named Jens Faurschou and two anonymous investors, to deal in the secondary market. They talked about the venture during the Basel art fair, in June. To keep people at the fair from finding out who was involved, they met in a private room in a restaurant in a village across the border in France, arriving in separate cars. “It was super secret,” Koenig said. “A total spy thing.”

A year and a half ago, a collector named Andy Hall and his wife, Christine, walked into the gallery on Centre Street. Hall had bought, in London, a painting by Frank Nitsche, a Berlin abstractionist, and learned that Koenig was Nitsche’s New York dealer, so he came in looking for more. Koenig introduced himself, and he and Hall quickly established that they had similar enthusiasms, especially for German neo-expressionist painting, a category that includes Georg Baselitz, a close family friend of the Koenigs, as well as Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck. Hall had begun collecting their work. In Koenig, he found someone who, in spite of his youth, knew a great deal about these artists, and who could also claim a personal connection to a few of them.

Koenig sold Hall another Nitsche, then asked if he was interested in Penck. Hall brightened: Penck was an obsession. Koenig took Hall and his wife up to his apartment, where he had several Penck drawings that he’d purchased from his father. Hall bought these. Soon, Koenig had Hall collecting the work of some of his own artists as well.

Hall, a fifty-four-year-old Englishman who lives in Connecticut, is the chief executive of Phibro, a commodities firm. He has made a lot of money trading oil and gas. He is tall, meticulous, and extremely fit, a former president of the Oxford boat club who rowed competitively until two years ago, and he approaches art collecting with the fanatical dedication of an oarsman. He had his first New York gallery experience three years ago. “I hate shopping, I hate salespeople, and I had this feeling that gallerists were salespeople,” he told me. “Also there’s a whole in-ness, with regard to which galleries are hot, that I can’t stand.” Nonetheless, one Saturday morning he and Christine walked into Mary Boone’s gallery, on Fifth Avenue, where they took a liking to a piece by an artist named John McCracken. “One of the Stepford men, one of her gallery assistants, said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said I was. And he said, ‘Mary would like to talk to you.’ “ The Halls were led back into Mary Boone’s office and connected to her by phone. “What do I have to do to make you like it enough to buy it?” she asked.

“Make me an offer I can’t refuse,” Hall replied. She did, and Hall had a McCracken.

Koenig prefers to cultivate an air of fellowship and collaboration with his clients. “They can never tell whether I’m selling or just talking,” Koenig said. He has a way, when sitting with the Halls and flipping briskly through books in search of paintings for them to covet, of arousing fervor for works of art. (“Look at all those Pencks,” I heard Hall mutter once, as the pages flew by. “Somehow I thought that I had them all.”) Although the dealer represents the artist, Koenig also occasionally finds himself working on the collector’s behalf, becoming a kind of adviser—an agent working both sides. He spends a great deal of time with them, on the phone or in restaurants. His client list has two hundred names, but there is a handful to whom he turns most often, and who are the most supportive of his artists’ work.

Last fall, Koenig suggested that the Halls travel with him to Germany, to meet Georg Baselitz at his home, a renovated thirteenth-century castle in Derneburg. (Derneburg was familiar ground for Koenig; when he was a child, Baselitz would take him eel fishing after midnight in a river that runs near the castle.) At around the same time, Koenig got a call from his mother, who told him that Baselitz and his wife, Elke, were thinking of moving and were mulling what to do with their vast collection of contemporary German art—a hundred and twenty works, which occupied some twenty rooms on the castle’s third floor. “Huge works,” Koenig told me. “No itsy-fitsy stuff. Five or six real masterpieces.” Baselitz had wanted them in a museum, and had made overtures to the local government, but talks had fallen through. Koenig didn’t say anything about this to the Halls. He didn’t want to appear as if he were selling something.

Baselitz has a reputation for cantankerousness, but the Halls’ visit went well. “We were so excited to somehow have passed the test with Georg,” Christine Hall, a slim, fashionable, and slightly giddy Englishwoman, told me. “You’re always nervous that you’re going to be somehow gauche.” They were smitten by the collection, but the idea of buying it did not occur to them until months later, when, after several more trips of his own, Koenig floated the possibility. The Baselitzes thought of Koenig less as a dealer than as a kind of son—a boy, really—but, because he’d introduced the Halls to them, he was the obvious go-between. Eventually, Elke Baselitz called Koenig with a number.

“It was a big, big fucking figure,” Koenig told me. “This was a hundred times bigger than anything I’ve done.” He relayed the information to Hall, who had by now allowed the notion to take shape in his mind, and asked him not to tell anyone about it—Koenig had stopped discussing the matter even with his mother. “You would’ve had people trying to dip their fingers into the cake, so to say,” Koenig told me. Anton Kern, Baselitz’s son, who is a prominent dealer in New York, was not involved. Neither was Larry Gagosian, who is Baselitz’s dealer. In April, Hall bought the entire collection, for an estimated price of seven million dollars. (Neither Koenig nor Hall would confirm a figure.) Koenig said that his own cut, once you factor in some additional deals, was less than ten per cent. “There’s one person in the world who would or could buy that collection,” Koenig told me. “The whole deal was perfect, absolutely perfect. It was really beautiful.” Then he added, “It paid for the new gallery.”

Hall told Koenig recently, “I don’t know if I’m a complete idiot and you’re the best salesman in New York or if we are really onto something here.” That something involves amassing a collection that might one day be able to stand on its own in a private museum, either here or in Germany, perhaps even in Derneburg. Recently, the Halls, Koenig, and Baselitz have been discussing the prospect of the Halls’ buying the castle. It would house the Halls’ collection, and serve both as a monument to Baselitz and his contemporaries and as an exhibition space for new art. Koenig would have a role, although it’s not yet clear what that would be. This year, Hall also bought thirty new Kiefer paintings from a gallery in London, for around four million dollars, and an additional fifteen Baselitz paintings from the artist himself; again, Gagosian was not involved. Koenig was emboldened by the experience. He told me one evening, after several pints, “I’m going to be Georg Baselitz’s dealer. I’m going to be Anselm Kiefer’s dealer. If it’s thirty years from now, so be it. But I have a feeling.”

A dealer must often make studio visits—to find new artists or to check in with his own. Sometimes collectors come along, taking the opportunity to see the artist in his element and to buy work before it has been shown, or even finished. Sometimes the dealer goes alone, keeping collectors’ requests in mind. One day last spring, I accompanied Koenig as he made the rounds.

A livery car conveyed us to Brooklyn, to a windowless garage belonging to Erik Parker, whose street-waif manner and graffiti-imbued art work have earned him some attention, here and abroad. Parker, who is thirty-seven, elicits good prices—in the range of twenty to forty-five thousand dollars a painting. He seemed tongue-tied and anxious; the whine of an oil-tanker truck across the street was driving him mad. To drown it out, he’d put on a record of Hawaiian chants. The sonic mix suited the paintings, which were garish and psychedelic, with dyslexically rendered slogans about the art world and the global energy market.

“Out of this batch,” Koenig explained to me, “two paintings have to go to the Basel art fair. And one has to go to the next group show at the gallery.” He expected it to be sold to a couple from Long Island.

In the current overheated market, the laws of supply and demand do not necessarily apply: often, the more work an artist creates, the higher the prices he fetches. Each show presents an opportunity to charge more. Parker, for example, shows at galleries in Zurich, Berlin, Tokyo, and Milan, to say nothing of the art fairs, which have proliferated and become increasingly frenzied and lucrative. Consequently, Parker can have a show every few months. Each one leads to more critical appraisal, more talk, more buying, and higher prices. It keeps him very busy turning out product.

Parker gave Leo and me a lift to another Williamsburg garage, where Tony Matelli, a thirty-four-year old sculptor with a caustic and literate sense of humor, was applying plaster bandages to the shaved leg of an assistant, in order to make a cast for a new edition in a series called “Fucked.” Earlier versions had featured models of chimpanzees and humans impaled with various tools and weapons: axes, swords, chain saws. The new one would portray a couple, already impaled, being clobbered from above by a baby grand piano. The piano, in tatters, would be sculpted out of fibreglass, plastic, and wood. “Great piece, tricky sell,” Koenig said. It was destined for a show in Copenhagen. The gallery there was balking at giving Matelli an additional eight thousand dollars to finish the work, so Koenig had offered to put up the money, hoping to extract recompense later. There was a discussion about some collectors who wanted to borrow another of Matelli’s works to exhibit with their collection. “And now they want to show it in their piece-of-shit ghetto space?” Matelli said, as he worked. “Please. If they were better collectors, I’d say fine.”

Aidas Bareikis’s studio was a few blocks away, a small space on the ground floor of an old warehouse. It was taken up mostly by a sculpture called “Mugpuller,” based on a game Bareikis used to play as a child in Vilnius, to see who could make the strangest face. Bareikis must have been good at it. He had big, startled-looking eyes, an expansive mouth, a jutting jaw, and enviable bed head. He seemed dismayed to have company. There was no real business for Koenig to conduct here. The point was just to see Aidas.

“Mugpuller” consisted of a breathtaking arrangement of ghouls fashioned out of heaps of plastic toys and knickknacks, which Bareikis had partially melted on a grill and spray-painted gold. “I haven’t seen this one,” Koenig said.

The three of us walked a few doors down to Torben Giehler’s studio, a big, clean loft space hung with a few giant colorful canvases. An assistant was painting a wall white, and Giehler, a red-faced German whose shyness might be mistaken for hostility, was removing tape from a painting of a mountain composed of multicolored quadrilaterals. The assistant wheeled away a paint cart. The scene brought to mind an operating room after surgery. Giehler silently appraised his work.

“That’s fucking great,” Koenig said.

“That’s fucking great,” Giehler mimicked, in a mock-Cockney accent.

Koenig’s core artists are prolific. Nearly all of them are painters, which leaves him out of step with the current curatorial enthusiasm for photography and video art. As unadventurous as painting can sometimes be, it makes for good business, because paintings last a long time, and they fit well into an existing tradition of visual art. Owing to the decorative aspect of painting, there is a broader base of possible buyers than there is for video art or sculpture or installation. Bareikis, for example, has a hard time selling his work, though it does find its way into museums. To make ends meet, he continues to do construction and demolition work. Giehler, on the other hand, can make twenty paintings a year and sell them for between twenty and fifty thousand each. (It seemed telling that while we were at Giehler’s studio Koenig sent Bareikis out to get beer.)

“I just don’t care if people think that painting is past,” Koenig told me. “I feel comfortable with painting. It’s what I know. I’ve tried with photography, for example, and I’ve failed miserably. Photography just doesn’t do it for me. It’s so easy to make a photograph visually compelling.”

Some of the other artists converged on Giehler’s studio, and then everyone trooped a few blocks down the street to a place they call May’s, a nondescript Chinese restaurant that used to be a hangout for the Koenig crew. Twenty people—the artists and their mates—gathered around a few tables near the window, over heaps of moo-shu pork and bottles of beer (Koenig’s favorite, Reissdorf, from Cologne, which he had arranged to have imported to May’s). People wandered outside to smoke. An argument sprouted up, out of Koenig’s earshot, when one artist’s wife suggested that all Germans were Nazis. After a while, I found myself sitting across from Bareikis, who, with a grim and transfixing gaze, began to tell me about Afghanistan.

Koenig was born in New York in 1977, and though he spent less than a year here, he told me he has memories of it—ambient memories, SoHo in the lizard brain. He was Kasper and Ilka’s third child. They were already separated when she became pregnant with him. “Leo was my present to Kasper, to try to make it work again,” she told me. It didn’t. The Koenigs moved to Munich and the marriage ended. Leo, throughout his childhood, saw little of his father, for whom he substituted various male friends of his mother’s, among them Penck and Baselitz; Penck helped him learn how to draw. His mother called Leo der Rattenfänger, after the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because other children used to follow him around. He told me that he was “first terrible in school, then brilliant—kind of figured it out.” For his final project in high school, he interviewed Baselitz. His interest in art really took shape in the summer of 1997, when his father got him a job as an assistant on the Münster Sculpture project, a once-a-decade exhibition throughout the city of Münster, north of Cologne. His father took care to treat him no better than the other assistants. They stayed together in Leo’s grandmother’s mansion. They got into a big argument one night, when the elder Koenig returned to the house ready for his evening bath and found that his son had filled the tub with bottles of beer.

When Leo moved to New York at the end of that summer, his mother arranged for him to stay in the SoHo loft of her old friend Hiroko Kawahara and her husband, the reclusive conceptual artist On Kawara, who is famous for writing telegrams to friends saying simply, “I’m still alive.” (“I remember him, of course, but I’ve never been to his gallery,” On Kawara said, when I unexpectedly got him on the phone this summer. This doesn’t say much: Kawara has never even been to an opening for one of his own shows.) Meanwhile, Koenig’s father had given Leo a list of names, which he used to secure three internships: with the gallery owner Paula Cooper, the art dealer and publisher Brooke Alexander, and the German dealer David Zwirner, the son of the gallery owner Rudolf Zwirner, with whom, incidentally, Kasper Koenig had got his start, decades earlier. Leo was working for Zwirner when he decided to go off on his own. Koenig says that to raise money for the Williamsburg gallery he bought a half-dozen Raymond Pettibon drawings from Zwirner and sold them, at a markup, to Zwirner’s clients—an end run that did not endear Koenig to his boss. “Be careful,” Koenig recalls Zwirner telling him. “You’re starting to be clever. Don’t be clever.”

Amid a burgeoning Williamsburg art scene, Koenig put cleverness aside and instead played the heedless impresario. His gallery became known not so much for art as for art parties. There were benders, at home and abroad. Often when I spent time with Koenig and his artists, he tried to get them to tell me stories about the wild times. Usually, he’d wind up telling them himself. “Shall we talk about Copenhagen?” Leo prompted them, one evening.

“There should be a movie,” Giehler said.

“What happened in Copenhagen?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Giehler said.

What happened is that in 2000 a group of them went there for a show, and, because of a blizzard in New York, their art failed to arrive. To the astonishment of their hosts, they spent two sleepless days and nights prior to the opening in the gallery getting drunk and making new art. There was bad behavior all around. In the end, the original art work was found, but the legend of the young ruffians from New York had spread and the show was a rousing success.

“Nobody was thinking about the future, what role we were playing, how we were being perceived,” Koenig recalled. “We were just doing whatever we wanted. It was as extravagant as can be.” Nonetheless, he managed to turn decadence into something of a business proposition. In 2001, he left Brooklyn for Manhattan, moving to a space on lower Broadway that earned him a flash of new-kid renown but which was rendered unviable, almost as soon as it opened, by the attack on the World Trade Center, a few blocks away. At the end of that year, he relocated to Centre Street.

Koenig was determined to demonstrate independence. When he visited Cologne, he’d stay in a hotel room instead of at his father’s house. When Kasper came to New York, Leo picked him up at the airport in a limousine. “He was like a kid in a movie,” Kasper told me. “I said to him, ‘Come on, now, it’s a nice gesture, but once is a enough.’ It had a naïve childishness to it, in a positive sense. It was almost depression of some kind, I guess.”

“I was in a bad phase,” Koenig says. He and the artists fancied themselves a kind of gang—part Cedar Tavern, part “Sopranos”—an aggressive interpretation of the old bohemian cliché. They had their own Mafia-style social club in Brooklyn, with shag carpeting, poker tables, and a painting of a horse. One night in 2002, in a Williamsburg night club after the opening of a show by the painter Lisa Ruyter (the show was called “Follow the Boys” and consisted of paintings of Koenig and his artists, among others, hanging out in night clubs), Debora Warner, Leo’s girlfriend, complained to the d.j.s about the music. One of them called her a bitch and may or may not have shoved her away. Koenig punched him, and Erik Parker’s brother smashed a bottle of beer in his face. A week later, Koenig was arrested in his gallery and jailed for several hours. Though the charge of assault wasn’t pursued, the d.j. sued Koenig and the Parkers, asking for eight million dollars. They settled for a tiny fraction of that. Parker gave Leo a painting to sell in order to cover his brother’s share. Ruyter left the gallery. Inevitably, the incident inspired a work of art: Tom Sanford, a young Koenig artist, who usually depicts African-American hip-hop stars and basketball players (he is white), is making a painting of it, with a composition based loosely on Poussin’s “Rape of the Sabine Women.”

It also prompted introspection, on Koenig’s part. “I felt obnoxious,” Koenig told me. “My father called me a fat cat and a sneaker entrepreneur. I thought, That’s not me.” He went sober and arranged for an off-duty policeman to keep him out of trouble, or at least to keep trouble away from him. He learned, as he put it, “when to leave.” He had his first drink—several drinks—eighteen months later at his father’s wedding, in Germany, to Barbara Weiss, an art dealer. The next day, he missed his flight home and spent the morning in the airport, throwing up.

One of Koenig’s newer and better-known artists is Alexis Rockman, who enjoyed some success in the eighties and nineties with his colorful and ecologically precise paintings of habitats altered by global warming. Rockman is forty-three, a fitness buff, a Democratic activist, a square with a crewcut. He grew up on the Upper East Side and spends his summers in Sag Harbor. He does not drink. He leaves early. But his sales had flagged, and earlier this year his gallery closed.

“I needed to find a youthful exuberance to put me back in the mix,” Rockman told me. Sanford, his former studio assistant, introduced him to Koenig. Rockman was impressed by Koenig’s ability to connect his artists with European collectors. “If he could do that with me, I’d be so psyched,” he said. Within a few months, Koenig had sold an inventory of about a dozen of Rockman’s older paintings. “His job is to sell art,” Rockman said. “That’s what he’s done incredibly well.”

Two months before the opening of the new gallery in Chelsea, Koenig took Tony Matelli, Torben Giehler, and a painter named Les Rogers to see the new space. Koenig was dressed in a worn light-gray chalk-striped suit, a purple shirt, and square-toed cream-colored loafers. Giehler had come from Brooklyn by bicycle. Koenig held open a sheaf of blueprints and surveyed the space: aluminum wall frames, sprayed-concrete walls, a poured-concrete floor. It is in a brand-new building, on a freshly anodyne stretch of streetfront, and is flanked, mallishly, by other galleries, to the east and west. Idiosyncrasy will be the art’s job. The blueprints called for a large front room, a smaller back room, and, behind a pair of huge oak doors, a vast office for Koenig.

Koenig’s movements were brisk, exaggeratedly optimistic. “This floor is awesome,” he observed. He was especially proud of the gut work he’d had done in the ceiling. “I paid up the wazoo to run the shit pipes through that beam.”

“Well, it feels like a gallery,” Matelli said.

Giehler and Rogers expressed some misgivings about the proportions of the front room. They stood near the door and imagined their paintings on the opposite wall. “I think this is narrow,” Giehler said.

“It’s twice the size of the old gallery,” Koenig said.

The perception of narrowness derived, in part, from the placement, across from the big wall, of a long, chest-high counter just inside the door, where the gallery’s staff would sit. “Why not put the desk here?” Giehler said, indicating a sort of crawl space that would soon be closed off by sheetrock.

“You can’t have your employees behind a wall,” Koenig said.

“Why not?” Giehler said.

“Because they work for you and you want them to work well.”

The artists walked in various directions, pacing off the dimensions. “What’s the typeface on the door going to be?” Matelli asked. “Everyone in Chelsea uses the same sans-serif we’re-a-fucking-business typeface. It’s pretentious.”

Koenig didn’t answer him. He got on Giehler’s bike and started riding in circles, circumscribing the space with big Butch Cassidy swoops. “This isn’t one of the monster galleries of Chelsea,” he observed cheerfully, “but that’s a big wall.” Another lap. “I think this is great,” he said. His cell phone rang. “You get a good cell-phone signal in here, too—five bars, full coverage.”

In March, at a time when Koenig was having trouble finding new artists to add to his stable, Tom Sanford recommended a friend named Kelli Williams. She was thirty-two and worked as a teller at a Citibank branch in SoHo. She had spent five years working on her six paintings. She was shy and a little strange. Koenig said that when he went to see the paintings he was flabbergasted. “They’re like jewels,” he told me. “I’ve brought collectors there, and they are foaming, just foaming. No one knows her, but there’s a myth building.” He began paying her to paint, so that she could quit her day job, pick up the pace, and build the myth.

“Once she’s done these six paintings, we’ll have a show,” Koenig said. “She has never shown anywhere, which is great. The slate is clean for me. Now I can really go to work.”

When I visited Williams’s studio with Koenig, in an apartment in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, the six paintings hung on three walls, in various stages of near-completion. They were small and painstaking—she uses a three-haired brush—surreal Boschean pornography in Renaissance landscapes. Williams has dyed-red hair, in a sort of wedged pageboy cut, and a wide-eyed look that somehow simultaneously conveys apprehension and assurance. Koenig went from painting to painting, inspecting each up close, pointing with a long finger at elements he did or did not like. Standing before one that was all but done, he suggested that she add a layer of varnish to it, to bring out the colors and give it a classical sheen.

“He’s full of shit,” Koenig said. Talk turned to deadlines and the timing of a solo show. “I think you should take as long as you need.”

“I had a hard time getting work done in April,” she explained, defensively. “I was upset in April.” She told him that a French billionaire had offered to put her on salary and pay for health insurance in exchange for her work. She sent the collector an e-mail with legal disclaimers in it, which scared him off. Koenig told her that she’d done the right thing. “I’m O.K. being poor,” Williams said. “I just don’t want to be a failure.”

Two months later, one of her paintings was hanging in the group show that opened Koenig’s new gallery. It was seventeen inches by eighteen inches and depicted a contorted female figure whose breasts were where her buttocks should be. Koenig pronounced it a “masterpiece.” He said, “The miniaturist style, the craft, the obsessive-compulsiveness is something I respond to.” He told me that he had ten buyers who were interested in it, but that he could not bring himself to sell it. “I’m not there yet. It’s not ready. It’s my painting, anyway—I’ve been paying her for a year—and I want to own it for a little bit longer.” As he said this he ran a finger along the top edge of it, a caress that ended with a flick at an imaginary bit of dust. “But she’s going to want me to sell it, and Hubert Neumann is probably going to get it, just because I like him so much, and because he wants it the baddest. We’re at twenty-five thousand dollars now, but I won’t be comfortable until it’s at fifty thousand.”

When a dealer maintains a waiting list for an artist’s work, it is not first come, first served. Collectors with whom the dealer has a standing relationship often take precedence. Surreptitious deals are cut; the sports term “future considerations” would be appropriate here. Dealers also prefer buyers whose ownership will burnish the artist’s credentials; primacy generally goes to institutions, or to those who have private museums, and then to those whose collections are virtually museums unto themselves. When Koenig got a call about a Kelli Williams this summer from an adviser to the Los Angeles collector and television executive Dean Valentine, he said, “Straight to the top of the list!” He did the same for Steven Cohen, a publicity-shy hedge-fund billionaire who, in the past several years, has become a voracious collector of blue-chip art. Cohen’s reputation is such that when he came calling, asking, as Koenig recalled, “if he was allowed to buy, I was thinking, Is this actually him or am I being set up here?” Eventually, Cohen bought a painting by a twenty-five-year-old Koenig painter named Justin Faunce, who had his first show in February, for twenty-five thousand dollars. “I generally buy only established artists,” Cohen told Koenig.

In Koenig’s case, the collector who best embodies the key attributes of familiarity and prominence is probably Hubert Neumann. Neumann lives on the Upper West Side, amid Picassos and Matisses that his father, Morton Neumann, a Chicago mail-order magnate (he made a fortune on beauty products), began collecting in 1948. Morton Neumann was dismissed early on by the art world as a coarse and gullible enthusiast, but in time he amassed one of the country’s great collections of twentieth-century art. He died in 1985. Hubert Neumann, who is seventy-four, has been an avid collector for more than fifty years, having learned the same lesson his father did: that, when it comes to appraising art, other people are often wrong. Of Koenig’s artists, he collects Tom Sanford, Erik Parker, and Christian Schumann. He is an unpretentious but argumentative man with a mustache and a Cheshire-cat grin who dresses in golf shirts and says “man” a lot. He doesn’t let many people into his house to see his art. When I tried to invite myself over, Neumann told me to buy a book instead—“A Passion for Art,” which has pictures of his collection. And when I asked him about the business of contemporary art, he delivered a mild scolding in the form of an hour-long lecture.

“There are as many stories about it as there are people involved,” Neumann said. “It’s a personal thing for me. If artists are emerging, it’s got to be a personal experience with the work and the artist, and then with the dealer.” He went on, “Leo’s a special guy in his field. What makes him special, if you hang around this world and compare him to others, is—he’s Leo. Leo is not interesting because of his father or his uncle or whatever. Basically, I think his father is a jerk. The reason Leo’s interesting is that he’s in a position to advance the cause of emerging art. Emerging art needs that kind of support. It’s a flower that needs nourishment. It’s a delicate and wonderful thing.

“The art world hasn’t changed,” he went on. “There will always be five or six great artists in a generation. The rest of them are just going to become dust, or different degrees of dust.” Neumann objects to cynicism, and he made sure to point out, as we talked on the phone, that he was surrounded at that moment by works that had been dismissed by the world as peripheral at one point or another and that were now regarded as important. “It’s a lot of baloney to be a dealer or a collector unless the art has a chance of being profound,” he said. “And if the art work is profound, then the art market is irrelevant. That’s what makes it magical.” He cited the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his contention that civilization is defined by three things: science, philosophy, and art. Of these, visual art is the only one that you can own or acquire. “That’s why it’s so special,” Neumann said. “That’s why you have all these people running around like ants in the art world. They’re all running around thinking they understand what’s profound. But they can’t, because it’s ephemeral.” He went on, “What happens is people like to create myths. And they’ll make a myth about Leo. And it may even have a substantial element of truth to it.”

The bulk of the Baselitz collection arrived on these shores by air in August. It was moved to an art-storage facility on Eleventh Avenue, where the Halls maintain a fourteen-hundred-square-foot climate-controlled private space. On the last day of the month, the Halls came into town, from their home in Southport, Connecticut, to conduct some business with Koenig, and then the three of them went to check on the shipment. They were greeted at the storage facility by Oliver Stebich, an art shipper and storer, who led them into a windowless white room skirted by thirteen paintings, which had been unpacked and propped against the wall. Stebich, Koenig, and an assistant donned white gloves and began delicately removing the thin layer of foam that protected each painting. Gradually, the room filled with angry color. The paintings—Penck, Polke, Kiefer, Immendorff, Lüpertz—were grim, crude, almost primitive, many of them featuring iconography relating to postwar Germany. A number of the Pencks had been smuggled from East Germany; one had been painted on an old woollen blanket. Hall and Koenig moved from painting to painting, elucidating motifs peculiar to each artist’s oeuvre: painter’s palettes in the Kiefers, eagles in the Immendorfs.

“I’m dazed,” Koenig said.

“It’s reassuring that (a), it all got here safely, and (b), it looks even better than it did at Derneburg,” Andy Hall said. He drifted around the room, with a queasy grin that seemed to blend reverence for the work, pride of possession, and the anxiety of appreciating objects for which one has paid dearly. “They look better here,” he said again.

“Every single one of them has a story,” Koenig said to me. “They have significance.”

“Four or five of these we’ll bring to Southport,” Hall said. “The Polke, that Penck, maybe this Penck, the Palermo, and one of those Kiefers.”

After they had lingered awhile, they rode the elevator to another floor, to visit the Halls’ storage room. It contained, in addition to mousetraps, a thousand or so works in crates or in partial paper wrappings, on which the artists’ names were written in ink: Beuys, Warhol, Twombly, Clemente, Fischl, Hockney, Rivers, Hirst. Also, some from Koenig: Giehler, Parker, Nitsche, Rogers, Faunce.

“This is criminal, keeping all this in storage,” Christine said, with a sigh.

“Wow, we have great stuff,” Hall said, mostly to himself.

On the Friday after Labor Day, Koenig had an opening at his new gallery: eight paintings by Frank Nitsche. It was a grand opening, of a kind, since the first show there, a group exhibition featuring most of his artists, had débuted in the middle of the summer, at a time when the art world, true to its European roots and aspirations, had cleared out of the city. At 5 P.M., an hour before the Nitsche opening, the town cars started pulling up, one after the other, fifteen minutes apart, as though by prior arrangement. For Koenig, the paintings already had names attached. “I had certain people in mind, even if they didn’t know it,” he said. By seven, most of the big buyers had come and gone, and six of the eight paintings were sold. Koenig hoped to sell one of the remaining two to a museum. A young dot-com entrepreneur named James Healy, a regular customer whom Koenig referred to as a “triggerman,” took a liking to the other. Healy overheard a few collectors asking Koenig if he’d hold it in reserve for them. Koenig would not. Healy stepped in and pulled the trigger. The preliminary enthusiasm of others, tepid or insincere as it may have been, was affirmation enough.

It seemed that most of the people in the gallery at this point were artists, including Matelli, recently returned from Copenhagen, where he’d sold his baby-grand “Fucked” for a hundred and ten thousand dollars, and Bareikis, recently returned from Zurich, where his installation “Straight to the Top I’ll Take . . .” had sold for sixty thousand dollars. Bareikis’s time abroad had been miserable. He had got four tick bites in Germany, and had been put on a course of antibiotics and forbidden to drink alcohol. “It was a nightmare,” he said, looking a little shaky.

A celebratory dinner was held at Arqua, an Italian restaurant in Tribeca—an odd choice, in these frothy times, because during the art boom of the eighties it had been a sort of headquarters for the likes of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, whose declining reputations, fairly or not, have become cautionary tales. Koenig had reserved five tables of eight in back, mostly for his artists, though a few collectors, such as the Halls, who’d bought two of the Nitsches, and Hubert Neumann, who’d bought nothing, were there, too. Koenig stood to toast Nitsche. Andy Hall stood to toast the gallery. Finally, Nicole Eisenman paid tribute to Koenig, with a few remarks about how the gallery felt like a family and how grateful the artists were for that. Koenig started crying but recovered himself quickly. It was eleven, and the night was looking long. Six hours later, he was in Williamsburg, at May’s, watching five women dance on top of a bar. ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.